Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.
YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed. Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.
And the torrent of new activity continues: Alexander Polakov has imported FreeBSD’s mptutil(8), good for managing LSI Fusion-MPT controllers.
In this recent note about the new wireless driver framework, Rui Paolo noted how to add a ath(4) device as wlan0 automatically.
Sascha Wildner has ported MultiMedia Card support from FreeBSD; SD, SDHC, and MMC cards should work in DragonFly now. Man, there’s been a lot of new additions recently.
Rui Paulo’s work porting the current set of FreeBSD network drivers over to DragonFly has been committed; there’s about a zillion commits (via Matthew Dillon) today to show for it.
Rui Paulo’s work on wireless drivers will be entering 2.7 very soon. (2.6 is unaffected.) This will cause problems if you are running acx(4), bwi(4), iwi(4), iwl(4), rtw(4), rum(4), or ural(4), until someone writes a driver that matches the new framework. If you’re on 2.7 and you need these drivers working, hold off on updates for a bit…
David Shao is working on improving DragonFly’s DRM (kernel graphics drivers, not that other thing). That’s a good project to start, and also Antonio Huete Jimenez is willing to test it. We can always use more guinea pigs; if you want to contribute to DragonFly without writing code, testing someone’s dramatic changes is a big help.
Newegg is having a big SSD sale; I’m repasting the email with models and prices here. Use it for swapcache! There’s also a promo page with fancy images.
Alex Hornung posted a followup about his I/O scheduler work, with some interesting ways to watch the state of your disk’s activity.
Thanks to work from Samuel J. Greear and Alex Hornung:
- Install Firefox (natively)
- libflashsupport and adobe-flash-plugin
- mount linprocfs
- null mount devfs within the linux system
There’s occasional video and audio sync problems, but Johannes Hofmann has already found a fix.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin posted his work on fan control, involving Winbond Super I/O Hardware Monitors. He’s had a series of commits up to this point, and this message nicely sums up the work done, including the presentations for it at BSDCan last year and AsiaBSDCon this year. Even if you aren’t planning to adjust your system cooling, it’s a surprisingly in-depth writeup, with more details available.
Newegg is running some specials: a 64G Kingston SSD for $140, a 256G (yikes!) Crucial SSD for $660, and a Sans Digital port multiplier for $110. The SSDs are good for using swapcache(8), though 256G is probably overkill. Doesn’t make me want it less, though…
The port multiplier’s SiI3726 chipset might be supported, or potentially supported, by the sili(4) driver. Someone have $110 to spare to try this out?
As if Alex Horning wasn’t busy enough with his Linuxulator update, he’s also made it possible to have a vinum root volume in conjunction with using devfs.
“Device initiated power management” via AHCI is now possible, thanks to Johannes Hofmann. If I understand it correctly, it lets the computer handle power reductions automatically, which is more efficient than setting by hand.
Michael Neumann has added his port of the e1000 driver from FreeBSD, though he doesn’t recommend using it yet. He’s looking for testers who have this hardware.
Constantine A. Murenin has committed support for aps(4). This supports various sensors for disk and mouse activity, and even acceleration sensors.
Michael Neumann has ported igb(4) and em(4), and he needs people with the corresponding hardware to test it. Those are network cards, if you aren’t familiar with those short names.